Standing on the steps of the Moon Pyramid with a view over the main plaza, with the Sun Pyramid behind us

Surprisingly, there’s only about three months left of our time abroad, living in Panama. With Christine on a teacher’s schedule, we don’t have much time to get away from the city and travel internationally – but in devoutly Catholic, Latin American countries, Easter can provide that opportunity for a vacation!

Our original plan was to put a new country under our collective belt – Nicaragua. Christine had a fellow Language Fellow friend living in the capitol city of Managua, so we quickly arranged a 4 day trip that covered Managua and the nearby tourist central of Granada. We were quite excited to see the nearby Masaya semi-active volcano, which Christine’s friend pointed out was only 15km from his home. Oh good! Everyone is okay with this, right? Nicaraguans don’t mind having bubbling lava cauldrons within murder-range of their homes? No? Okay then.

But obviously, the title says Mexico City and pyramids, not Nicaragua and volcanoes. So what happened? We were all set the morning of March 28th; we got to PTY airport with plenty of time, relaxed in our Priority Pass lounge with some complimentary drinks, and ambled casually to the gate when we figured it was about time to do so. The attendants at the gate scanned our tickets and then asked us to show our Yellow Fever certifications.

Wait, what? What certification?

Our hearts started to thump a bit as we stepped out of line and waited for a specialist to come over from her office to speak with us. A couple minutes later, we were told that Nicaragua requires a certification of health, stamped by the World Health Organization at least 10 days prior or more, verifying that you’ve received the Yellow Fever vaccination…if you’re coming from Panama or 11 other countries. We had thought that we had done our due diligence by looking up the CDC advisory page for Nicaragua. As you can see, it doesn’t even mention Yellow Fever, much less that its vaccination is mandated. But of course, that page doesn’t say anything about the requirement, because it’s written for Americans arriving from the USA. If we had searched for Panamanians traveling to Nicaragua, we would have found this page and things would have gone much differently. But we had failed to do our proper research, and now, there would be no trip to Nicaragua, no volcanoes, and no vacation. A lump rose in my throat as I stared down at my now-worthless boarding pass. We left the airport, found a Diablo Rojo bus and sat in thoughtful, frustrated silence for the two hour ride back to the apartment.

Christine, to her immense credit, didn’t give up. After three hours on a shaky VoIP phone call to Chase’s support line (she had purchased both our tickets via Chase’s travel portal) we discovered that we’d be able to get a complete refund in Copa Airline credits, valid for one year…complete, minus a $100 per ticket penalty. It was far better than we’d expected, though, and we quickly cast about online, searching for plane tickets for Friday, the 29th, that wouldn’t break our limited budget.

There was basically nothing, though. Panama might be a central travel hub for Latin America, but it’s a business hub… there’s no “last minute” cheap seats available anywhere. The only affordable option that kept coming up was Mexico City, where we’d be able to only spend an extra $220 for each ticket, on top of our credit, for a weekend getaway. We reasoned with ourselves though, that at least housing and food would be cheap – it’s Mexico City, after all!

So, the wheels of vacation turned in our favor thanks to Christine’s patience on the phone, and we were on a 9am flight to Mexico the next day. It would be her sixth time visiting the country, and my second… I loved the food and friendliness of the Mexicans on our visit to Oaxaca in 2015, so why not turn our disappointment from losing out on Nicaragua to excitement for the opportunity to visit one of the largest, most ancient cities in the world?

What kind of meat goes into tacos that you’re paying 17 cents apiece for? ….chicken and sausage, of course. Geez, they’re running a legitimate business here.

Mere minutes after leaving the MEX airport, we found a covered market next to the metro and the chance to eat 5 tacos for 15 pesos… about 90 cents or so. Although we’d be later teased that there was no way the chorizo and chicken in those tacos was safe to consume at those prices, they were slathered in onions, cilantro, and tomatillo sauce, so we were in heaven. Tacos in Panama City, for comparison, are usually one taco for $2.50, and that’s if you’re lucky. Have I mentioned before that Panama City is an insanely expensive place to get food? It is.

After checking in at the AirBnb of the wonderful Fabrizio and Mariana (we definitely recommend these two as friendly, hip young people with a cute little apartment) we immediately set off again to see if there was any sort of Easter-related activities we could partake in. Fabrizio told us that down in Itzatapalapa (I love the names of barrios and regions around the Central Mexico area) there might be a Passion reenactment going on, if we hurried. Well, we were too late for that (missed it by 15 minutes) but it turned out the main street of the barrio was athrong with people for a street carnival and fair. We found out that in Mexico City, Easter is such a huge holiday that kids are given two entire weeks off from school – the weeks before and after the holiday itself. We wandered the packed streets, eating cheap tacos all the way and examining the cheap (safe? maybe) rides and cheap trinkets that you could win with familiar shooting and ring toss style games. We rode an extremely fast Ferris wheel and while it was great at first, I found myself wondering if perhaps I had eaten too much cheap Mexican street food beforehand…

All officially licensed from the appropriate authorities, of course

There were so many things for sale next to the carnival – besides food of course, there was thousands of pieces of reddish pottery (which we saw in restaurants everywhere), wooden ladles at least a meter long (for stirring what, we wondered), all kinds of little plastic knickknacks from China, but more heartwarmingly, dozens of types of different little wooden children’s toys that looked hand made… perhaps cheaply made, and quickly, but wooden handmade toys for just a few dollars. Also, fried and spiced locusts! I remembered seeing those both in Jordan and Oaxaca the last time we visited.

At first I thought this might have been a temporary, paper maché addition for Easter… But nope, it’s steel and welded right onto the pedestrian walkway!

After a breakfast of fresh baked bread from Fabrizio the next morning, Christine and I took a bus from Estación Autobuses del Norte to one of México City’s most famous tourist sites – the ancient city of Teotiuacan. The line to purchase bus tickets stretched back for 20 meters and the buses themselves seemed to be arriving, filling in 15 minutes, and then speeding off with a cough of that famous Mexico City pollution. The ride itself was short, only 45 minutes, but we were all deposited a good half mile away from the entrance to the site at the side of the road and told to just walk a bit further up the path. Seeing the slow moving line of cars trying to get into the actual parking lot ahead of us, it seemed like this was probably a better option for both tourists and driver.

Another half an hour waiting in the entrance line (this would become a recurring theme on this, a holiday weekend in one of the world’s most packed cities) and having paid our 70 peso entrance fee, and we were free to wander the dusty paths of the archeological site. Hundreds of vendors had set up bags by the paths, or were even wearing their entire commercial ventures on their backs. Most of the items for sale were common trinkets like bracelets, shawls, and little statues, but I had been hearing an eerie sound for the past hour and was curious to figure out what was making it.

Mateo the jaguar seller

It turned out that the craftsmen had developed what I will call, in absence the knowledge of its proper name, the Jaguar Whistle. About the size of a fist (the medium sized one; they also came maybe 2 centimeters larger and smaller for plus or minus thirty pesos each way), it was brightly painted and sculpted as the snarling head of a jaguar, sometimes as a jaguar headdress with the scowling face of a warrior peering through the teeth. My chosen vendor, Mateo, was a good salesman and quickly taught me how to blow through one not with a straight breath, but with a buzzing “frtrtrtrtrt” roll through your teeth. The shape of the whistle shapes and deepens your breath and makes it sound just like a big cat’s raspy snarl. I’d never seen one before, and promptly paid my 100 pesos to receive a freshly painted (and smelly) new whistle. Mateo pointed out that all the vendors worked overtime to shape and paint thousands of new items right before major holidays, knowing that the tourist sites would see easily 10 times the usual amount of foot traffic, hence the sharp smell of the paint; the item I was holding had been made just yesterday. Well, no better way to help that paint dry faster then to blow on it constantly, much to Christine’s delight!

Praise the Sun!

Christine and I are more thrifty than educationally enlightened when it comes to most archeological ruin sites: we don’t pay for a guide or usually even a pamphlet (although we will take a free map if offered), we just make a beeline for the biggest, coolest looking thing we can see from the front gate. And in this case, it’s the Pyramid of the Sun. Wikipedia calls it the third largest known pyramid in the world (by volume, not height) with the largest being a massive step pyramid, also in Mexico, and the second being the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Oh well, at least I’ve seen two out of three now. The line was gigantic, and took about 1.5 hours to wait through (surrounded by Mexican children attempting to use their own jaguar whistles but only getting sad wisps of air through it; they hadn’t had the benefit of Mateo’s teachings so I showed a couple of them the proper blowing method. Their parents looked as thrilled as Christine!), carefully parsing our shared bottle of water and trying to keep our skin either covered by jackets or slathered in sunblock. Mexico City is at one of the highest altitudes I’ve ever been at, and the combination of thinner atmosphere and dry air was already wrecking havoc on us.

The moon pyramid, as seen from the steps of the Sun

By the time we got down the steep flanks of the Pyramid (so steep they had police officers helping people climb down the steps, and the “exit” steps were almost as slow-going as the “entry” steps due to cautious climbers) it was almost 2, so we mosied over to the Moon Pyramid at the end of the “Avenue of the Dead.” No one knows who the original builders and inhabitants of this religious complex were; even the name Teotiuacan was given by awestruck later cultures when the site was found again and is not the original name; it means something along the lines of The Place Where Men Become Gods, with the idea that any humans who could have built such impressive edifices must have been deified and raised into the heavens as a reward for their prowess. The names Sun and Moon Pyramid, likewise, are not original. Avenue of the Dead, though, seems a little silly and “edgy” for it to sound original; at least the Sun and Moon Pyramids are believable names!

We weren’t allowed to climb to the top of the smaller Moon Pyramid, only to a platform about halfway up it,  but its position at the far end of the site allowed for some good pictures looking down the Avenue with all the little temples and the Sun Pyramid proudly overseeing.

That night, back at our Airbnb, the four of us were chatting together when the electricity suddenly went out on the entire block. It seemed like as good an excuse as any for us all to go and find a pub, so we took a half hour walk along the Paseo Reforma main Street to Regina Street, a pedestrian walkway with a lot of trendy little bars and nightclubs. I had the opportunity to try a locally made Imperial Porter which was expensive by Mexican standards (120 pesos or $6.66 at the moment) but was delicious. Christine tried a “Curada” which is pulque, a common Mexican fermented cactus water, mixed with a flavor of your choosing. After we tried Fabrizio and Marianas pitcher of Curada Zapote (mixed with the jet black and sweet zapote fruit) Christine thought that the Avena (oatmeal) one sounded good. Well, one thing was for sure, we definitely got more of the pulque flavor coming through on that one – but not to poor Christine’s benefit. Soon afterward Fab and Mariana caught us all a taxi home so she could lie down and rest her churning stomach.

Sympathizing with Christine’s upset stomach, Fabrizio cooked us an authentic Italian dinner at 1am!

The next morning was Easter Sunday and also April Fool’s day, so we began the day by heading to the Historic District of the city and seeing the almost completely destroyed ruins of the great temple of Tenochtilan, the Aztec/Mexica city that the Spanish “Nuevo España” had been founded on top of. Of course, Catholic Europeans would not have missed a chance to humiliate their captive locals, so after razing the great temple down to its foundations, they built an ostentatiously massive cathedral right next to it to send all their new converted-by-the-sword Mexica subjects to. My own obvious feelings on colonialism aside, the cathedral was quite beautiful on the inside and we listened to a sermon in progress for a few minutes from the rear galleries. There were police officers standing beyond the gallery making sure that tourists didn’t try to get unholy on the place and proceed any further to take more pictures and be inadvertently disruptive.

Outside the cathedral, however, some native people were holding a worship service of their own to Queztalacotl. Sans sacrifices, thankfully.

We caught the excellent Mexican metro from the Historic district down to the main central park of the city, where we had a relaxing 20 minute walk with several thousand of our new close friends, enjoying their holiday. Street clowns were out in force, drawing large crowds and bringing up children from them to pantomime with. Vendors of course were everywhere (sunglasses for 10 cents, anyone?) and people were walking more dogs than I think I’ve seen in half a year in Panama city.

nom nom nom statuary

Our destination was INAH, the national anthropology museum that we’d heard good things about. Admission was 70 pesos yet again (seems to be a common foreigner price in the city) and free for the locals on Sundays, so once again, the place was packed. The museum is laid out into 3 two story buildings, facing toward a sunny inner courtyard with a pool, with each of the three buildings covering a different period – the ancient pre-historical, the pre-Mexica cultures like the Toltec and Mayan, and then the last building being reserved for the most recent and final native culture, the Mexica (which most people know as the Aztec). Of course there are a lot more relics from that latter culture since it only ended 400 years ago vs thousands.

While perusing a time line of the Mexica’s wanderings, I noticed a Matt Groening cartoon on it! What are the chances…

While the majority of the relics and items being presented didn’t have English translations of their signs, Christine knows me well enough after a decade that she knew what I’d find interesting and translated for me if she thought I’d like something. Also, the larger signs introducing groups of exhibits together were usually written in both Spanish and English so every time we entered a new area, I’d immediately scout out its English signs so I’d have at least a basic idea of what was going on, and whether or not I should stay and turn my puppy dog “please translate” eyes on Christine. Overall, I’d say that for $3.86 the museum is definitely worth seeing for any English-only gringo that might find themselves in the city, and if you’re fluent in Spanish, it’s a must-see. We didn’t even have time to check out the second floors in each building or walk around much in the outdoor exhibits!

Oh don’t you worry, Teotiuacan, I hadn’t forgotten about YOU since yesterday…

There was enough time left in the evening to grab some delicious plates of mole-drenched tacos and some savory Micheladas (ingredients: 20 oz of dark beer, a half ounce of worcestershire sauce, and a salted rim – oddly addictive!) at the nearby Los Panchos restaurant and catch a bus back home. Tomorrow afternoon we’d be catching our flight back to Panama – and hoping that the country hadn’t initiated a yellow fever certification requirement while we were gone!

Well, at least we got to see Nicaragua from a distance (that’s the main lake in the country, with its two main volcanic islands in the middle)

Christine and her parents, at Tsugoi…with the Sushi Ark! 10* of every kind of sushi were brought aboard… (*6 kinds only)

While Christine’s parents were visiting us in late February, the four of us scored free tickets to Panama: The Musical, showing in the northwest part of town near the Canal. The show is billed as Panama’s first musical, with an all-Panamanian cast, and one articles states that even the ministry of tourism for the country put a reported $50,000 into the show. It’s already slated to run again in 2019 and 2020, which is really incredible support for the first national musical. Here are some photos (wallpapers, even!) from their official website.

The four of us enjoyed seeing it, and it was a great first-time presentation for a nation not yet known for having a Broadway style scene of its own yet. But since the show will go on again for at least two more years in Panama (and the fact they’re calling it a World Premiere here in PC means they have plans to travel too!) we also had a few thoughts about where the musical unfortunately had some problems.

First of all, the leading ladies, Gabby Gnazzo and Alexandra Cordoba, had great voices and were a joy to listen to. However, my linguistics-teaching girlfriend pointed out that it’s a Panamanian habit to not properly enunciate English language consonants, and these ladies, singing in their second (or even third, or fourth – who knows) language, bring that mild consonant slurring into their singing. Great voices, but very difficult to tell what they were singing about almost all the time. Far better than I could sing musicals in Spanish though, of course!

Thankfully though, the plot of the play was rather…simplistic. Now that 2018’s show has ended I feel okay saying that a mild spoiler is that it’s a standard “boy is in love with girl, bad guy wants to steal girl instead” style plot. Since the show is named “Panama: The Musical” all four of us had really been hoping that the story would focus on something uniquely Panamanian, something to make it stick out in one’s memory. It’s set in the 1920’s, which would have been a bright new time in young Panamanians’ minds with the canal newly finished and providing a lot of work to the economy. But it has a very USA style to it, which might have been a great way to bring in curious audience goers if the play had been in Spanish – “what was it like to be a worker with all the gringos back in the 1920’s What was life like for our young men and women back then?”

But because the play is in English, I have to assume the target audience is going to be short-term tourists, expats like Christine and I that live in the country, and highly educated Panamanians who speak English fluently. This, unfortunately, automatically limits the visibility for the play to the local audience.

Initially, we saw that the play’s tickets were being sold for as much as $60-80 per ticket…Broadway level prices! As time went on though, we saw they went on Gustazo and OfertaSimple, two local “Groupon” style deal sites. Both Christine and her mom applied for “four free ticket” drawings on the Panama Musical website…and both of them won four tickets. When we appeared for our free showing, we saw that for the matinee, there were only 20-30 people in a theatre that could hold two hundred.

I feel bad for Panama: The Musical because I worry they might have bitten off more than they can chew. I feel like a city, and especially an entire nation, should gauge the health of their community theatre…community…(hmm) before committing tens of thousands of dollars to showcasing a new interest in musicals. Why an English language musical as the nation’s first heavily advertised and even government subsidized showing? Why limit yourselves to only fluent English speakers?

Sadly, the show’s final fifteen minutes were particularly bizarre and strayed even into the disappointingly “campy”…camp. Without giving away the ending, let’s just say there’s a lot of Deus Ex Machina and rapidly trying to resolve the plot all at once. Our main sinister bad guy goes from about to win and cement his victory, to being whapped on the head from behind. You can almost hear the “wah wah wahhhh” trombone sound as he rolls his eyes back theatrically and collapses. Once again…it’s a very simple plot and I don’t think it spoils anything to hear that yes, the good guys win and the bad guys lose. No surprise.

The writers could patch things up a bit by removing some of the musical reprises and using that breathing space to slow down and pace out the ending, instead of making it feel rushed. They could potentially rethink the ending and make it a little less slapstick. It was just very jarring to have this serious love story with passionate (if sometimes incomprehensible lyrics) singing ended with slapstick, and it felt almost like an entirely different musical was bolted onto the last 15 minutes.

The front of the program says outright that the directors, producers, and writers view this show as a labor of love, and they know that it will need to be tweaked. As someone who wants to see more musicals all over the world, I have the best of hopes for them, especially since apparently the ministry of tourism itself sees this as something that they want to patronize. I sincerely hope that more money will be given to smaller, more local community theatres and their shows, to build an organic audience of local Panamanians that see theatre and musicals as a great way to spend their time and money both as an audience and even as actors.

But right now, now that the run has ended (I didn’t want to write this while the show was going on, so I waited til after it was finished to write a semi-critical review), while the play was an entertaining way to spend a couple hours, I’d unfortunately have to say that it would have been ridiculously overpriced at $60, or even $40. At its current level of sophistication, the show would be worth $15-20 – the sets, costumes and talent of the orchestra were great – it’s just the story of the show itself, and the pronunciation of the singers, that left us feeling like there were some major improvements that could be made.

But remember, as one of the opening songs points out…necesistas tener un sueño! 🎶

The cast wasn’t around to pose with after the show, so their in-theatre poster will have to do!

You can never get as good of selfies when you’re doing it at 3:30am. Front facing cameras are terrible.

When it comes to cycling, it seems that I am a glutton for punishment. It’s been almost exactly 9 years since the first time I decided to do a crazy-long bike ride, and unlike the Dead2Red’s long relay rides in 2009, 2010, and then winning first place in 2015, this would be the first time I’d attempt the “short” distance of 99km, all by myself. How hard could it be?

Christine’s boss, Rick, picked me up in an Uber at 4 in the morning yesterday on the 4th of March. I had been tiptoeing around the apartment so as to not wake up Christine – not that she would be awakened by anything less than a jet flying 15 meters overhead, but still trying to be polite – and hurriedly crammed a couple of tuna sandwiches into my mouth and some protein nut bars in Denis’s borrowed camelbak, and hurried outside.

We were the first to arrive at the USA embassy, the employer of not only Rick but most of the people in our group. I got to go through USA embassy security for the first time to get to the back lot, and helped Rick bring some of the stored embassy employee bicycles out to the front where the transport van would be arriving. The embassy had also provided us with free jerseys – extremely tight fit, but this time I got an XL, so it just barely got around my lanky frame. I felt like Spiderman. Paco, the unofficial leader of our group, was doling them out of a big plastic bag as other people started trickling in, checking tires, lights, helmets, and all the other important things you need for a ride.

We were a little worried about the status of our 25 or so bicycles being crammed, upright, into a single large van. I heard someone joke “it’s not like a bent derailleur will be a problem, right?” Since I was on a loaner bike, I solemnly hoped that nothing would happen to betray the owner’s generosity on our 45 minute trip up north to Colon.

“Uh, can we fit all our bikes in there? And even if we can…should we?”

Our trip up the Colon-Panama Expressway was quiet, with most of us napping or quietly chatting. The sun rose as we drove, around 6:15 or so, and now we could see the bike racks and mounts on almost every single  vehicle on the highway going in our direction. It was going to be a full race…I saw hundreds of lovingly packed bicycles in a half an hour.

Moments after disembarking near the Port of Colon and stretching our legs, we heard a cheer erupt from nearby, and dozens of bicyclists shot past us. There was a brief panic among some of us, me included, that we had somehow missed the start of the race and we were too late, but some of the more experienced riders assured us that this was the “Gran Fondo” group that would be going 125km, instead of our “Medio Fondo” group that would be doing 95. We still had an hour to go before our ride began at 7:30.

Paco on the left, and Barry Sif on the right. Weird towel-headed man in the middle

Rick and the others strapped on 4 digit numbers to their handlebars and clipped the same number onto the backs of their jerseys. I, on the other hand, had cheaped out and would not be “officially” competing, unlike my rides in the Dead 2 Red. It might “only” have been $100 (Official O2O jersey not included) but I had heard from multiple sources that in previous years the support stations ran out of fruit and water and the celebratory at the dinner also had supply problems. Coupled with my current lack of employment, I decided that I would make like a camel – with my camelbak! – and carry my own water with me; six liters to be exact, plus five of the aforementioned protein bars.

Most of the US Embassy group lined up about 3/4 of the way back from the starting line

Most of the embassy group had registered, except for a small team of Marines who had only arrived in the country a few days earlier. They were on rented bikes and like me, had no official numbers to pin on anything. We kind of bunched together, hoping to not be noticed as the 50 meter long line of cyclists edged towards the starting gate where the electronic RFID sensors would start tracking the official contestants, but of course, no one paid us any attention and the woman with the megaphone cheerfully announced us as “Bienvenido a Los Estados Unidos!” as we gave a roar of approval (my hope that we’d shout USA! USA! USA! together as we crossed the start line had been vetoed earlier, ha!)

Paco gave his phone to a helpful stranger, who was able to give us a nice pre-race photo

It was 7:44 in the morning, and the streets were lined with people cheering us all on and taking photos. There were a few drones flying overhead with cameras – how times have changed since 2009! – and police officers standing at attention at every intersection, preventing the local morning traffic from roaring out and flattening any unfortunate cyclists. I saw now what that $100 was going toward – as it turned out, every single intersection along the entire route was guarded by at least one, usually two police officers, keenly watching the growing lines of traffic in the oncoming lane who might want to turn left across our path. There must have been at least two hundred cops along the route, with support trucks and motorcycles to escort the occasional convoy of a half dozen cars that needed to go our way, safely past.

For the first 10-15km, I was able to keep up with Paco, Rick, and Barry on their fancy road bikes and unladen backs. Barry called back to me that “whatever time you finish with, add an extra two miles per hour to your average just for carrying that bag on your back!” and I cheerfully called out to Paco’s GoPro “hybrid bicycles foreveeeeeeeeer!” minutes before exhaustion struck me and they all disappeared up the road. The last I saw of Rick was his bright orange helmet and socks glinting in the sunlight.

Continue reading this post…

The USA group! Notice how only the women and children are wearing our official jersey (well, plus Paco and Barry front and center)

It’s time for another coast-to-coast bike ride! After doing the 250km Dead2Red three times in 2009, 2010, and 2015 as part of a 5-person relay team, I’m ready for a new challenge – the 95km ride between Colon along the Caribbean coast down to Panama City on the Pacific. The race is in only three days, and while I don’t think I’ll bother to pay the ridiculous $100 registration fee (I’ve been told by multiple people that the support is terrible, they run out of water immediately, and the ‘celebration food’ at the end is mediocre) to become an official registered racer, there’s going to be approximately 3000 other riders milling around the starting line, so it’ll be easy enough to just bring a bike up to the starting line and just start pedaling.

I heard about the ride from the USA embassy, and was twofold lucky – first, I’ll be getting free transport for my borrowed bicycle and I up to Colon at 5:30 in the morning on Sunday, and second, the embassy is paying for free jerseys with USA Embassy of Panama proudly and prominently emblazoned on them. Ever since the USA ambassador to Panama suddenly announced his earlier-than-planned retirement a couple months ago *cough no idea why cough* I’ve heard that it’s a little bit of a wild west around the embassy. As long as you’re within your budgetary goals for your division, you can get a lot of stuff greenlit and quickly approved. Another commemorative bicycle jersey, hurray! My 2009 jersey from assisting the Rome to Mecca bike group from the border of Syria down to Amman is starting to get a little long in the tooth…

Anyway, where was I? Our practice ride last night – about 150 people, including a few children, met at the Hotel Miramar on Avenida Balboa (right along the Pacific coast) was larger than usual, as we were joined by some young Marines on a new deployment to the city, a lot of jersey-clad embassy employees who’d be doing the Ocean To Ocean this weekend, and even the president of the USA Triathlon club, Barry Siff.

Unfortunately, I almost got lost and missed the entire thing! I had no idea that the hotel would actually be located inside the giant median between the northbound and southbound lanes of traffic on Balboa. I had waited the entire 5 minutes for the light on the southbound side to allow me to cross, then took the pedestrian overpass over the northbound, before I realized – wait a minute, the hotel couldn’t possibly be on the pacific-side of the highway. There’s no room over here! It must be on the other side! But where…? So then I had to backtrack for 15 minutes to get all the way to where I’d originally waited on the other side of the highway, then back down the street with the traffic to finally find the hotel, which I promptly got lost at again trying to find the parking area everyone was waiting in.

Thankfully though, I made it in time to catch the last bit of Barry’s greeting to the assembled audience, and my embassy contact Paco also greeted everyone and, to my untrained spanish-hearing ear, extended greetings on behalf of the United States too. Pretty cool. When you work at an embassy, maybe you get to extend greetings on behalf of your country a lot if you want to!

There was something surprising about the jerseys: they’d all been ordered in strange women’s sizes. Normally I wear a Medium or Large, but as I grunted, strained, and discovered I couldn’t even close the front of the jersey enough to zip it up, it was revealed that only the XXL’s and XXXL’s fit even the normal sized men in our group. Paco kindly told us that we’d be provided with larger jerseys by the time the ride would start on Sunday morning – either way it’s fine by me.

Then we were off! It took about 5-10 minutes to get the group going each time we stopped; there’s a lot of entropy with a 150 person cycling group, but after rolling about a bit in the parking lot, building up speed, we hit southbound Balboa at about 10km per hour, to the sound of resounding whistles of the orange-shirted CCP (a local cycling club) volunteers skirting about the outsides of our 200 meter long caravan.

The cars had…mixed reactions to us. We’d end up doing two hours cycling together, on many different kinds of roads, but it was a little collar-pullingly nervous to be constantly surrounded by honking cars. Were they honking in friendly camaraderie? Look at you go, cycling at night, way to go? Or were they honking in irritation and frustration that they had places to be and our 200 meter tight column was impeding their progress? Probably both. It didn’t take us long to reach first Calidonia neighborhood, then Casco Viejo itself. The old city was designed with horse-driven carts in mind, and the city decided to keep the classic old buildings as they were and not increase the width of the streets. There was no way any cars were getting around us. I remarked to one of the Marines, a friendly young man with a round face, that it seemed like the streets were deserted, which was surprising to me. Minutes later, much like the phone game Snake, we doubled back around on ourselves, almost eating our “tail” of straggler bikers, and we saw where the cars were: backed up behind us for several blocks. I saw a Traffic Cop pointedly flag down one of the CCP volunteers and I caught the Spanish phrase for “what are you doing here….” before I had pedaled past them. I figured we were pretty safe though; the traffic cops are on the lookout for ongoing stuck traffic jams, not slow moving traffic. As long as we didn’t stay in one place for too long, they’d ignore us.

Disaster almost struck when another one of the Marines, a pretty woman with long black hair took a spill right in front of me. The front wheel of her collapsible “1-800-RentMe” bicycle had slipped into the slots of a sewer drain, “el cantaria,” and laid her out flat instantly. She hopped back up immediately, a little red-faced but no worse for wear, but since I was behind her, I got off my bike and immediately started waving people around the drain pit. If the slots had been going in the other direction there’d be no risk at all but with so many inexperienced bikers, much less people not used to group or night riding, I figured it couldn’t hurt for me to help out where I could.

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I look like some kind of low-rent Batman villain

We stood outside the building and looked up at the large sign. “Premedico” it said, the Condado del Rey location. We had found a “groupon” equivalent deal for a local dentist (the most popular service for group-coupon hunters in Panama is named OfertaSimple) but I had no idea it was going to be a combination clinic, handling everything from cancer treatment to, well, a tooth cleaning.

Christine went first and came back 20 minutes later, wincing a little and slowly sipping a little paper cup of water. “It was….weird,” she said. “They used a waterpik instead of a metal scraping tool. Kind of hurt my teeth.”

When it was my turn a few minutes later, she went with me, in case she’d be needed as a translator between me and the dentist. “She’s super nice though,” she commented as the assistant led us up to the second floor of the little clinic. I was impressed by the office upon first entry though; plenty of high tech looking things, similar in styling to stereotypical USA dentist’s offices in the 80’s and 90’s – lots of milky white porcelain and that pastel blue padding on all the soft areas.

The dentist confirmed for us that she could indeed speak English pretty well, but Christine settled in with her book in the corner chair anyway, just in case. I was intrigued to see that the young male assistant, who I thought would be elsewhere by now, was actually just that – a straight-up assistant to the doctor, handing her tools on her command and helping her by holding things (and my face, sometimes) in place. I’d never been in a USA dentist’s office that had both technician and licensed dentist working at the same time.

Christine was right though – a little angle mirror was the only stereotypical thin metal tool that went into my mouth. A sleek and alien looking waterpik was handed over my wide eyes (covered in extremely large red tinted glasses) to the dentist, and when she fired it up, it whirred like a miniature jackhammer. Like I’d been warned, it did hurt quite a bit vs the unpleasant, but very used-to feeling of the scraping tool. I figured that in order to get the same effect as the physical contact of a scraper, the water had to be coming out of the tiny tip like a bullet, and I was probably feeling billions of tiny water bullets hitting my teeth every minute. Like the difference in water force in a touch-less car wash vs the one where attendants dedicate some actual elbow grease.

You know how some dentists will let you hold a little plastic vacuum tool so you can remove liquid from your mouth without spitting? Some don’t have that tool, or they have it but don’t let you hold it, and in some you just spit, “the old fashioned way” – well, Panama has the tool, but instead of doing either of the aforementioned options, they bend the plastic tube into a hook and then leave the vacuum constantly hooked and running over the side of your mouth. I had never imagined something like that before. It was annoying during the waterpik procedure, but I had no idea how bad it was going to get.

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At Valle de Anton’s India Dormida – only 2.5km of walking, but most of it was uphill!

I’ve just finished hosting my first visitor to Panama! My friend Aurelia and her boyfriend Clayton spent two weeks in Panama at our invitation, and I think they enjoyed themselves fully. It’s the sunny and dry season now in Panama – well, as dry as this tropical country seems to be able to get – and I’m sure coming down here was a welcome respite from the cold of Washington D.C. and even Los Angeles.

Since Decreto 331 one went into effect at the beginning of 2018 and hurt the ability of Uber and other ridesharing drivers to work in Panama, Aurelia got the unintended chance to experience the bus system right away. Thankfully it was a direct bus over the South Corridor toll road, so we were able to escape the far-as-we-could-see traffic on Avenida Domingo Diaz pretty quickly. Arriba was fairly polite to our guest; we’ve noticed that she gets sassy and more hyperactive when there’s lots of human voices talking to each other and ignoring her. It’d been a full day of travel for Aurelia though, so she wasn’t able to stay up late enough to be nipped at too much.

With the helpful (and thankfully easygoing, since my Spanish is so bad) hat salesman

No trip to Panama City can begin without a trip to Casco Viejo, unarguably the main tourist area for the city. The last time I was a tour guide in a foreign city for guests was Jordan 2015, but at least there I could draw upon two years of recalled Arabic to get me around. But this tour guide doesn’t speak Spanish – not well, at least! But since she was able to buy a Panama Hat and haggle prices for tribal artwork on the street, perhaps I did a little better with my muddled translations than I’m giving myself credit for.

Later that afternoon we saw a double rainbow up on our rooftop pool!

The next day, we took “the fancy method” of getting to the city of Colon, on the other side of the country (!!) straddling the Atlantic coast – the Panama Canal Railway. A classic and classy mode of transport to be sure, but I hope that the monthly commuter rail pass is more affordable than $25 each way! I can’t find any documentation on their website that tells me how much that rail pass costs. It’d be astronomically pricey for the average working class Panamanian to be paying $50 a day on transport when a bus between the city and Colon costs 50 cents. I enjoyed the free coffee service and being able to easily step out into the “smoking area” between the cars to watch and listen to the jungle rushing past.

The train goes over a narrow causeway through Lake Gatun

We didn’t spend much time in Colon, just walked up from the train station to the bus station to catch an onward bus to the village of Portobelo, further northeast up the Atlantic coast. As we walked through the squelching mud at the side of the road, we were politely hassled by smiling, English speaking women in tight shirts advertising Colon city tours and local restaurants. I felt bad; we had been told by basically everyone to avoid Colon as much as possible and spend as little time in the city possible. Desperately poor, the city is considered a mugging hotspot for tourists and foreigners, and I’ve heard that in fact, it’s dangerous enough for even locals, that the city pays for thousands of those commuter train tickets for canal workers at the Atlantic port, so that its workers can live in the safety of Panama City but work in Colon each day. If a place is supposedly dangerous enough that workers in its most famous nationalized business have to be shuttled in and out each morning and night, I probably am going to avoid it, just to be safe. But my heart went out to those bravely smiling guides with their laminated cardboard menus of trip activities. I hope there are tourists out there braver than us bringing a bit of tourist money into the city.

This was Aurelia’s first time on a Diablo Rojo, the “Red Devil” school buses that provide the absolute backbone of Panamanian cross-country travel. In the City we’ve got modern air conditioned metro buses that accept RFID payment cards. To go between the major cities you have USA-style coach buses with TVs and bathrooms, or even simple but serviceable white “chiva” mini-buses. But to reach all the myriad tiny villages that sprawl out through the jungle, you look to your last option – the Diablo Rojo. You have to pay with cash, as each bus is independently owned and operated, and while they are amusing to look at with their complicated, detailed, and unique paint jobs, their pollution and lack of safety is legendary. They’re in the process of being phased out throughout Panama City, where there’s a bland and modern Metro Bus being constructed to take each route, but I don’t see how they will ever replace every Diablo Rojo in the country. There’s just too many small villages with people who expect to be able to reach the town over. The local governments are going to casually look the other way when the national government says “so, you’ve gotten rid of all those buses in your district, right?” Unless the Federal administration has suddenly found the money and planning skill to acquire a 1:1 metrobus to diablo ratio, people – both passengers and diablo owner – are flat out not going to accept their routes going away. The painted bus, much like the plastic grocery store bag (which was banned 8 months ago to absolutely zero effect besides the gales of laughter of Panamanians when we foreigners ask about the ban’s status) is going to be around for the foreseeable future.

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